Monday, August 27, 2012

Criminalizing workplace death

A new article in the British Journal of Criminology
addresses the move to criminalize occupational fatalities. “Communication and social
regulation: The criminalization of work-related death” posits that public
demands on politicians to “do something” about workplace fatalities creates political risks they must
attend to. These risks reflect, in part, that government regulation is often
perceived (rightly or wrongly) as ineffective. Criminalizing workplace
fatalities is one (largely symbolic) response to this risk by channeling this
demand into a manageable process.

We see similar efforts in Canada and Australia to hold
corporations and directors criminally liable for workplace fatalities. Yet
criminal prosecutions, like regulatory ones, remain very rare. This may
reflects all manner of factors, include that workplace fatalities are often
considered to occur in the context of legitimate activity (i.e., making a
profit via legal business) thus different from deaths that occur from
illegitimate activity (e.g., a drug deal gone wrong).

Criminalizing some workplace deaths creates the sense that
something important has been done: symbolically, actors are being held
responsible for their actions. And, in a few cases, actors will be held
actually responsible via prosecution and conviction. Yet the question remains
whether criminalizing such behaviour is any more effective than the existing
regulatory system. Does it cause additional care to be taken? Is it associated
with a reduction in injury or death?

Perhaps it is mostly a political strategy to manage the
pressure that comes with widespread injury and death in the workplace.
Legislators can say “there, we made it illegal” (now please sod off) without
fundamentally affecting the operation of businesses. It also fits within the
basic neoliberal approach to regulation: regulating criminality is a legitimate
activity for the state while regulating the market is not. The question then becomes, when people realizing criminalizing workplace fatalities is in fact ineffective, what will regulators do?